Category: Digital

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have seen how Labour’s leadership change has electrified the New Zealand election campaign.

I’ve been monitoring the impact of Jacinda Ardern’s rise on social media, and it’s been nothing short of spectacular.

Here are some top line numbers, showing the top 10 political pages in New Zealand over the last week, order by total interactions (eg the number of people who have liked, commented, or shared a post from that page)…

Now as I said, I’ve been monitoring these stats for quite some time, and it hasn’t been a rosy set of numbers for Labour in a long time. In a typical week it would be unusual for any Labour page to crack the top ten, and even more unlikely for them to crack the top five. And here we are with Jacinda and Labour dominating the number of interactions on social media.

And if you take a look at page growth, it just gets better. Labour’s main Facebook page has grown by over 10% in a week, and Jacinda’s page grew a phenomenal 22.63% – up over 13,000 fans – in just a week. Incredible.

Even better for Labour, the flow on effect to their candidates has been massive too. In the past week Labour’s candidates have recorded an average page growth of 380. I’ve never seen anything like this. In the same week, the average page growth for National candidates’ pages was only 41. You can take a look at the full dataset here.

Likes on social media alone won’t win the election for Labour, but if they can convert even a small amount of the action they’re getting online into volunteers, donations and voters, they will be very well placed to snatch victory on September 23rd. Let’s do this.